real men, made up of boxes
by McChanged
Summary: This is pain like a warning, like fear, dark and ugly and all-encompassing, and there's not a single part of you that doesn't hurt anymore.


First off, I know this is not an update for the half dozen or so stories I have yet to finish, including, but not limited to, _Life and Times of the Emotially Screwed _and_ sink me in the river at dawn. _In fact, I really wasn't planning on making this a story at all, seeing as it started as a small, fifty word piece written for the sole purpose to get the idea of screwing up fairytales out of my head, and then _bam _three months and three thousand, or so, words later, this beast has turned into a full on soul sucking abomination. I can't really even believe I'm posting this, but I'm already outlining a second chapter from Mark's side, and a third chapter that will possibly end even more horribly than that one chapter of _Lives of Illusion _I almost ended on. Sorry for the nervous rambling, and remember that I truly am hoping to update something else sooner rather than later.

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><p><em>Put your pain in a box - lock it down; like those people in those paintings your father used to like. Real men, made up of boxes - chambers of loss and triumph of hurt and hope and love. No one is stronger or more dangerous than he who can harness his emotions - his past. Use it as fuel, as ammunition, as ink to write the most important letter of your life.<em>

_ - Act of Valor _

_xxxx_

In all honesty, you had spent years before Seattle not falling in love.

And the fact is: it's happened enough times in the handful of years you've been there to leave a scar.

One that, even covered over in fresh tissue, still aches like a phantom bullet wound.

xxxxx

_She said: 'write me a love story', and you did but you fucked up the ever after, and no one was really too surprised. _

_The problem lies in the fact that you're human, and you're damaged, and no one ever takes that into account when they're declaring you Judas; going right on ahead and tying the noose themselves. _

_Maybe years, and miles, and roads paved with anything but good intentions from now, she'll look back and remember that you might have hammered in that last nail, but she definitely handed it to you. Remember that she was right there when you sealed and buried that coffin labeled with _forever.

_But until then, you'll stay in this godforsaken city and hope she realizes that the next prince charming she finds is probably just as much of a deception. _

_(Which, of course she won't, never has, is always _just_ catching the signs in the rearview mirror no matter how familiar they are.)_

_You break her heart, and simultaneously release her like a bird from its cage. _

_You think, years and miles and too many blood drenched roads later, you'll still remember her exactly like that. When you hear her laugh in a crowd, or when you walk past her shampoo brand in the grocery store, the one she would leave on the shower floor no matter how many times you'd rage through the shut door after slipping on the slick residue it left, you'll remember the way her face looked: contorted and out of focus. In the seconds for you to say 'I'm a good man. I _am_, Iz.'_

_In the space between hopeful and heartbroken, that's what you'll remember when another girl in the same city sticks her hand out and forces a grin, says, "Marissa Levitt, Stage 4 Metastatic Melanoma."_

_xxxxx_

So.

Mark is an accident. (And later, when there's an actual story to tell, you'll leave this part out.)

You lose a patient in early January. You and Sloan and Robbins. A little girl with a tumor in her face and decades of life still spread bare, bleach white, in front of her. It was always a possibility that you would get in there and realize that it had spread. But it still surprised you, took your breath away, the fact that her body had so catastrophically rebelled against itself.

(You had considered making a joke about death certificates, and whether you had just signed hers', but really, you were far too busy trying not to throw up on your own shoes to be the asshole everyone thinks you are.)

Her kidneys fail, and her liver fails, and in a time span that's almost hilariously small, she's gone from a little girl who wants to be pretty like Jasmine, '_not _Cinderella because she's dumb, _duh,' _to a corpse under a starched white sheet, and you are _suffocating_.

Robbins, who informs the family, leaves with her daughter under one arm, her face tucked into Callie's shoulder, and you're having another panic attack in the same on-call room that you told Izzie you loved her all those years and miles and roads ago.

Mark doesn't find you, but Derek does because he's always had such freaking luckwith things like that. He opens the door and ducks his head, clicks his tongue in sympathy because he has a post-it and you and Meredith have always had familiar habits. He squats down beside you, and murmurs something you don't understand because you lost your hearing somewhere between the morgue and here, and then stands and leaves.

So that some five minutes, hours, years later, you're still sitting there with your head between your knees and a paper bag clenched in one fist when someone knocks and then slips in without waiting for an answer.

xxxxx

_Thing is, you knew that telling Meredith about Aaron was going to come back around and kick you in the ass. But you had to, had spent the entire trip back from Iowa trying to remember how to do an appendectomy, because not telling the truth screws you up. _

_In reality, you'd rather get called a jackass than a liar. _

_So you tell Meredith about your crazy brother following in your crazy mother's footsteps. About Amber who had looked at you as if she couldn't recognize you, like you were a completely different person than the one who left. Like, maybe she could see, outright, the disappointment covering you like a thick settling of dust. _

_(What you don't tell her is the way Amber had asked, whisper-like in a too bright hospital with a bruise across one cheek, if she could come back with you. How you had made excuse after excuse until your own voice sounded hollowed out to your ears, how you had left while she was sleeping because you are not Aaron and you are not your mom, but, really, you still can't be trusted not to fuck her up. )_

_xxxxx_

Contrary to popular belief, it takes more than ten minutes in a dark on-call room for you to start sleeping with him.

He's there and then he's not, and you're alone but breathing, and from there it's easy to stand up, get going, pretend you can't hear his voice echoing repeatedly in your head.

_(She was dead long before you cut her open, Karev_.)

But, something shifts in that small amount of time. Something minute, and something not important, except for the fact that it so clearly is. That it has to be _monumental _for him to start watching you like this.

He does it all the time. In the cafeteria nursing a cooling cup of coffee, and across an OR table mocking Arizona's problems with pumpkin flavored _anything, _and it's sort of like he's waiting for you to crash, if only for the part where he isn't.

There are lines, though, that you keep drawing; because you don't like to be watched over, or after, and so at first you don't acknowledge it at all. Continue with functional conversations, and interact with patients, and hope he gets the hint that you're fine.

He catches on, realizes he's the kid with his hand in the cookie jar, the guy with a hand painted red, but instead of backing off, he steps up. Starts initiating time spent together, asking, roundabout, if you've eaten or slept and yeah, you know you look like shit, have for months, but jeez.

(You wonder if maybe it's a phase, some sort of guilt complex he used to pretend he didn't have.)

And then you're sitting in Kepner's office, taking a break from watching an organ grow because apparently that's all Seattle Grace Mercy West is known for now, and you feel something hot at the back of your neck. Look up to find Mark leaning across the doorway, his legs jean clad and crossed at the ankle, one leather covered shoulder braced against the door jam, car keys clutched in his other hand, looking, for _all the world_, like he's been standing there forever.

Like he _would _stand there forever and not even bat an eyelash.

He grins, then, slow and warm and it's just a little blinding, a little heart-stopping. Says: _when's the last time you ate something; _tilts his head towards the clock like he knows you've been off for a good two hours, and laughs when you shrug and stand, accept the offer for what it is with only a raise of an eyebrow.

It's right then that you get it; realize that while you've been drawing lines, he's been crossing them. (Maybe to see where your limit is, but probably because he knows you might not have any concrete ones for him.)

It would feel a bit like he's courting you, except for the fact that you're not sixteen, looking straight ahead, searching the horizon for prom and graduation and happily ever after.

xxxxx

_It's preposterous, this idea that getting over things is based solely on the principle of time. On effort and willingness. There are things you're not supposed to get over, things that are there to _hurt _and _maim_ and _teach_. Maybe the reason life hurts so much is that people refuse to learn their lessons. Let the tragedies roll off their backs, and turn and walk away. Thinking that it makes them strong; tough and impenetrable. But, honestly._

_Maybe that's what weakens them. _

_xxxxx_

Sleeping together doesn't really change anything.

xxxxx

_The relationship, on the other hand, changes _everything_._

_xxxxx_

This is the other untold reason why it happens:

He found you in that blood splattered elevator, and you bled out beneath his palms. You were supposed to die, and didn't, which people call a miracle to your face and a tragedy behind your back.

Bottom line is: it happens and happens again and eventually you forget what was so wrong with it in the first place.

But you're still the guy whose girlfriends try to kill themselves, and he's still the guy who's always falling too short, and so eventually you remember, too.

Eventually, too soon and not soon enough, you snap. Corner him in an empty stairwell to settle a score no one was really keeping track of, and you spew nasty things. Things made to gut him, to make sure he knows how it _feels_ to lay on the floor and wait for his body to pump the entirety of its blood out. You tell him he can go fuck himself, that you don't need his _bullshit. _That you're not some fucking damsel in distress; that you're not _Lexie_.

And because he's the same Markwho sutured his own face, only six years older and a hell of a lot wiser, he lets you. Takes it all straight-faced, shoulders braced, and when you're done, he cocks his head and just for a moment you hesitate but by then he's already turning, walking out without looking back.

You're starting to see a trend, here and now, with your relationships, but you're sort of trying to decide if the pit in your stomach resembles _anything_ like relief, so you don't really care. Instead choosing to hurl, at his back, an expected warning about staying out of your freaking way.

And, surprisingly, or gut-wrenchingly, depending on your perspective, he listens.

He keeps his distance while spending time with, of all people, Avery. And with Callie, and his kid, and Derek, so that for weeks you're only catching snap-shots of him. His reflection in the steely door of a crowded elevator, his voice from a trauma bay, his drying signature on a chart.

But the most important thing is: Mark doesn't talk to you. Doesn't look at you, or hit on you, or anything _to you._ It was the whole point, what you wanted, and okay, yeah, you were _wrong_ because it hurts far more than you could have ever imagined. And, yet, you asked for this, you _deserve_ this.

Except, you miss him.

No. You _ache_ for him.

Feel hollowed out, and numb, stopping dead in your tracks in the middle of a half-full room wondering where your heart went; only knowing that it's _not here. _It's nowhere to be found, and you never used to be this dependent on someone like that, until you were, and you can't change it.

Can't go back, or call a redo, or tap your hand on a sweat sticky mat when it all becomes too much, when you feel like you're going to pass out and never wake up.

xxxxx

'_No take backs' he would laugh, with your back pressed against his kitchen wall, you making promises and pledges and declarations while his mouth trailed hot over your collarbone. And, later, when you were exhausted, stretched out on his bed on your stomach, he'd mumble it into the side of your neck, an unsure reply to the tension pulled taut across your shoulders, an instinctual need to _go_ never quite erased, and you'd say, because you were tired and content and out of sorts: 'no give backs either, jackass'. _

_xxxxx_

You get it, okay. Know the sayings, the warnings about hindsight and retrospect; about it all being twenty-twenty, rearview mirror clear and bright. But you do it anyway. Get way too close to Morgan and her premature kid, Tommy, with his fighter's name and underdeveloped lungs and absent dad. It lasts two months, because you have boards, and you're not worried, you're not, but everybody remembers your intern year and the disaster that had been, so.

And she's an intern; a freaking intern with a kid and medical bills and a mom who calls every day just to say 'come home'. So it ends and it hurts and, really, it was supposed to fade so much quicker this time around.

It sure as shit was.

xxxxx

_Here's the truth:_

_Izzie should have been the one. The happily ever after. The fairytale ending to a horror story marked with bruises and brain cancer, insane asylums and a glacially slow climb, hand over foot, to something resembling redemption._

_Addison was the light at the wrong end of a one-way tunnel. The one who set this all into motion single-handedly, years and miles and too many fog impaired roads ago; the unattainable catalyst for catastrophe, and yeah, you've always kind of had a thing for troublemakers. _

_Rebecca was the band-aide for the still stinging wound that was Izzie in that fucking prom dress with her dead fiancé and broken heart._

_Lexie was false innocence encased in a dirty, glass bottle. One of a couple girls who knew what she was getting into with you, who had no intention of saving you. (Because, let's be honest, Izzie saw a white knight long before you saw it yourself. And then gleefully, and painfully, held it against you when you finally played to the devil everyone claimed you were.)_

_Lucy was salvation. Or she could have been. Probably. _

_You miss them like old battle scars; healed over but still tender to the touch. _

_But, Mark._

_Mark you miss like a lost limb._

_xxxxx_

It takes weeks for you to man up. You keep freaking out; keep writing half-coherent texts about beer and basketball.

You hate basketball.

Hate that you're starting to like Avery. Hate that you left your traumatized sister back in Iowa.

Hate the feeling that you've lost Mark without ever having him and isn't that the bare, bleach white truth right there; because no matter how hard you jockeyed for the upper-hand, how hard you fought, bared teeth and all, he _always_ had it.

Was always showing up after pre-rounds with coffee, two creams no sugar, because he knew about the newborn in the NICU with the auto-immune disease, (too tiny and too underdeveloped and too _Morgan_)_, _and he didn't have to ask to know you had spent the majority of your night off doing charts next to her beeping monitors.

Was always covertly trying to teach you how to cook _actual_ meals so you wouldn't starve to death, and he'd have to find you on his kitchen floor with a ladle in your hand and ramen on the stove. Was always dropping insignificant facts about ingredients you've never heard of, and the complicated names of every utensil in his drawers, and _hey, did you know if you microwave cloves of garlic their skins will come right off _with his back to you in the kitchen; you straddling a stool at the island, going through flashcards until your eyes hurt.

It's sort of ridiculous, now that you can look back, now that you're not _in _it, that you thought he was trying to fix you.

That you were some kind of pawn.

Now, with everything clear, your head out of the game, you realize that he was handing you the upper-hand on a silver platter. Because he isn't good at relationships, but he was good at _you. _At knowing when to touch, and when to talk, and when to do neither, to leave you alone to trudge through your own problems.

And that most likely terrified him as much as it did you. Because there were times when you'd go grudgingly look for his glasses, bare feet freezing on his wood floors, because he was squinting at his laptop again. Or you'd put a sticky note on the fridge because it was definitely_ his_ turn to empty the hamper and you were running out of clean socks. Times when you'd pause in the middle of the grocery store trying to remember if you guys had run out of paper towels yet, and it was dawning on you that maybe this had gone far further than you had ever intended.

Far past the point of going back.

xxxxx

_You feel like you're being split open, gutted. Like someone slipped in a knife between your third and fourth ribs just so they know that you can hear the sound of your own blood sloshing around in your lungs; taste it like a penny between your teeth. _

_Like a glance in a funhouse mirror. Blurry and distorted and just out of focus, so that when you shift from one foot to the other, the image changes. A flip of a coin; a three-headed lion, then a lamb, and then back to the beginning. Never knowing what you're going to get until it's right there and all you can do is keep moving; hope to find an image you haven't seen before, because you've grown tired of the same ones: Jekyll and Hyde and Jekyll again, flashing back at you with a wink like they, too, know their time is limited. _

_xxxxx_

There's a moment, sometime during week ten, when you're so tired you can't see straight; when you've lost ten pounds without trying, without even realizing it, and there's not a single part of you that doesn't hurt. Pins and needles running up your limbs like you've just woken up from a nap that lasted decades, which, if you want to get metaphorical about it, you sort of have.

(You're still on the fence about the idea that conceding the fact that you're sort of spiraling makes you far healthier than when you would sweep it under the rug; swear up and down and sideways that you were fine, you were good, _hand to God, Mer._)

It should be simple, easy as fucking pie.

You love him and you miss him, and this was never the fate you felt carved into your bones. Saw scrawled in ink on dusty book pages in the back of an empty library, but it's what you have now, and there are stones in your lungs. Heavy, boulder-like stones that are rolling around your respiratory system making it hard to breathe, filling your throat until you can't even swallow around them.

And this isn't _Izzie_ pain, isn't even _Rebecca_ pain.

This is dinner when you're fifteen, sitting at a battered ceramic table trying not to stare at the purpling bruise covering half your mom's face, and steadily ignoring, too, the cast on your dominate hand that's forcing you to take twice as long to eat the tomato soup set in front of you, long gone cold and too thick. This is the way your spoon pings lightly against the chipped bowl as the screen door swings open, the undeniable _clang_ of a six pack and car keys juggled in the front hallway, always sounding something shy of a heavy pause, the eye of the storm, and you watching your mom's hands shake ever so slightly around her cracked coffee cup.

This is pain like a warning, like fear, dark and ugly and all-encompassing, and there's not a single part of you that doesn't hurt anymore.

There's a moment, sometime during week ten, when you're so tired you can't see straight; when you've lost ten pounds without trying, without realizing it, and you're standing at the nurse's station outside of peds trying to find the energy to go buy an apple at the very least.

And then, suddenly, there's a too warm hand on your elbow, and you can breathe before he even says anything.


End file.
